This course starts with a review of atomic physics. The only atom for which the Schrödinger equation can be solved exactly is hydrogen. For all multi-electron atoms, some approximation must be made. Here we discuss the simplest approximation where the multi-electron wave functions are antisymmetrized products of hydrogen-like wave functions.

Reading
The lectures do not closely follow a book for the sections on atoms or molecules. There are online notes that can be found by following the links in the course outline above. Other sources that describe this material are:

• Review of the hydrogen atom: Demtröder - Das Wasserstoffatom or the chapter, 'Quantum Mechanics of the Hydrogen Atom' in The Physics of Atoms and Quanta (Atom- und Quantenphysik) by Haken and Wolf.
• Many electron atoms (Mehrelektronatome) in The Physics of Atoms and Quanta (Atom- und Quantenphysik) by Haken and Wolf or the chapter 'The many-electron problem' (Das Mehrelektronenproblem der Molekülphysik und Quantenchemie) in Molecular Physics & Elementary of Quantum Chemistry (Molekülphysik und Quantenchemie) by Haken and Wolf.

For the exam you should
• Be familar with the hydrogen wave functions
• Be able to write down the many-electron Hamiltonian for any atom
• Be able to write the many-electron Hamiltonian in terms of a sum of atomic orbital Hamiltonians
• Be able to construct an approximate multi-electron wave functions of any atom as antisymmetrized products of atomic orbitals
• Be able to evaluate the energy of a trial wavefunction (a guess) in any Hamiltonian

Student presentations
• A Matlab program to calculate the time evolution of an N electron atom. The program is not long but since the problem is intractable it requires enormous computer resources to run.
• Grundzustand und erster angeregter Zustand des Heliumatoms, Manuel Zingl, 2010

Resources
Handbook of Basic Atomic Spectroscopic Data (NIST)